Reliance Lyf Water 1 joins the club of exploding smartphones
The spontaneous explosion and complete destruction of a Lyf Water 1 yesterday, a phone used mostly by Jio users, as tweeted by user Tanvir Sadiq is another reason for both consumers and manufacturers to be more cautious. Going by the news and incidents being reported based on exploding smartphones, you would imagine that they might actually make it to the hazardous equipment list soon.
The latest one to grab attention has been the rather unfortunately named Reliance Lyf Water .Yesterday, Tanvir Sadiq, a user tweeted images of his mangled phone, along with the helpful input that all he was doing was browsing on it at the time. Even as Reliance Jio officials rushed to pour 'water' on this crisis, it would have been scant comfort to other manufacturers and marketers, starting with Samsung, who are still fighting with the challenge these exploding phones have thrown up.
The second half of 2016 has surely not been the safest in terms of smartphones especially after the Note 7 chaos. Not only with the Note 7, smartphones like OnePlus One and even the iPhone 7 caught fire due to unknown reasons.
Based on the report by Economic Times, a Lyf Spokesperson responded - "We are concerned about the incident reported in social media and are taking the matter seriously. We are assessing the cause and will conduct a thorough investigation in the matter. Customer safety is paramount to us and, based on our findings, we will take appropriate action"
Regarding the specifications, Lyf Water 1 comes with a 5-inch FullHD (1080 x 1920) display. On the inside, it is powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 615 octa-core processor clocked at 1.5GHz coupled with 2GB RAM and 16GB internal storage which can be expanded to 32GB using a microSD card. Out of the box, it runs on Android 5.1. For Photography, the device features a 13MP rear and 5MP front-facing camera. Apart from having the necessary connectivity options, the device comes with a 2600 mAh battery. Reliance Lyf 1 was launched at a price of Rs 14,699 but is now available at around Rs 10,000 on both Flipkart and Amazon India.
Lyf smartphones owe most of their sales to the quite introduction of the Jio network among employees of Reliance way back last year, where they were the only brand initially with the free offer. Reliance Lyf seems to have been investigating the issue and we hope to see a fair investigation, which keeps consumer safety paramount.
However, Reliance won't mind recalling the device if the issue remains as compared to Galaxy Note 7 for Samsung, Lyf Water 1 is not a flagship device from Reliance Lyf.
